Of course, if Rogue One hadn't raided Scarif then the Alliance wouldn't have gained access to the plans and wouldn't have known how to destroy the Death Star...
It's possible things could've worked out better if they hadn't. The Rebels forced the Empire's hand in a lot of ways, and there's no real reason they had to raid Scairf immediately (aside from the fact that they had a shuttle with current access codes, but they could've stolen another one sooner or later). But with no stolen plans, Leia would've been able to retrieve Obi-Wan without complication, Alderaan may not have been destroyed (since it was specifically chosen to put pressure on Leia), and the Yavin base would've stayed hidden. The Death Star would certainly have been used on some planet once the Senate was dissolved, but maybe not for a little while longer. The plans could be stolen later on and, potentially, retrieved without compromising the location of Yavin base, at which point a Rebel strikeforce would just have to intercept the Death Star at a time and place of their choosing.
But, hindsight is 20/20, and I don't think the smart move is, "Let's see how many planets they blow up, and maybe we'll get around to stopping this doomsday machine later." The other big chance for something to go worse for the Rebels is if Krennic finds something when he audits Galen's files, and finds out the reactor has been designed so it can only fail catastrophically. There's a question about how much he could do about it at that point (the Death Star II apparently had the same flaw, and the Empire's solution was to patch over it by making it harder to get to the reactor, and adding an extra module that had to be disabled before the reactor itself was attacked, rather than designing a power system that wouldn't explode when damaged).
As for the article, I follow the blogger on Twitter.
He wrote one more recently about the Battle of Hoth, also criticizing the Rebels' strategy there. I think it had the same flaw of overlooking narrative context (in that case, he calls out Hoth Base for not being designed to stand up to a siege by Walkers, but overlooks that the base probably wasn't fully fortified at that point. They'd only gotten their airspeeders working the previous day, so it's likely they simply hadn't had time to set minefields and create chokepoints in the terrain and whatnot. Could be the late Admiral Ozzel had been correct in preferring surprise to stealth, and if the Empire had taken the long way in to the planet, Hoth would've been better-defended once they arrived).
